326 LAND REFORM
field system [in post-Chou times], they still determined land area in paces [po]
and m:vo and had nine classifications for tax purposes. We may criticize Korea
for not reaching [the heights achieved by] China since ancient times in various
matters."~.1
He even extolled the land system of contemporary Tokugawa Japan described
in Kang Hang's Kanyangnok as superior to contemporary Korean methods: "Even
though Japan has vulgar barbarians throughout its islands, they are still able to
fix boundaries when making measurements of land and keep the statistics of
land and popUlation clear. Could a country known for its respect for rites and
righteousness [Korea] not do as well as an island of barbariansT44 If Yu had
been either a fundamentalist or a nationalist, he would not have made invidious
comparisons of Choson Korea with post-Chou China or contemporary Japan.
Was Yu, however, correct in his belief that the inequalities and injustices of
the Korean land-tax system were the fault of the kyi5l-bu system of measure-
ment? Kim Yongsop, the leading scholar ofland tenure relations in the late Choson
period, thought that the regulations for the grading of land was in fact the key
to the state of both state revenues and the peasant agricultural economy, but he
has assigned responsibility for the failure to implement these regulations to the
irregular and arbitrary decisions of clerks and petty officials in deciding which
of the six categories of kyol was to be chosen to register a specific parcel of land,
and what was worse, failure to register the lands of the more influential persons
in a community at all. He found that land was hardly ever registered in the high-
est two grades of kyol in the three districts he studied, and he assumed that the
more prestigious owners were able to register their land in lower categories than
the feltility of their land warranted, while the land of the poor peasants was reg-
istered in higher categories than they deserved. Furthermore, land surveys that
were supposed to be carried out at a national level every twenty years w~re often
neglected. In the seventeenth century, land surveys were carried out in 1601,
1634, r663, r66s, and r668-69, and even then sometimes only in a few
provinces, but thereafter only in 1719-20 and in the late 1860s under the Tae-
wongun's regime.
In the early nineteenth century Tasan (Chong Yagyong) complained bitterly
about the failure to carry out a cadastral survey for some time, and in the mid-
nineteenth century Yi Kyugyong listed twenty different illegalities and distor-
tions in the survey of land that were unrelated to the type of measurement used.
He complained primarily of bias in favor of the wealthy, a lack of compassion
by the clerks, an excessively mechanical method of establishing boundaries and
quotas, putting fallow land on the tax registers and preventing anyone from
reclaiming it, relying on the word of the clerks no matter how valid the griev-
ance of the peasant, failure to conduct personal inspections of the land or reduce
taxes under famine conditions. He concluded that it would have been better to
dispense with surveys altogether.^45
In short, Kim concluded that as rational and enlightened as Yu's proposal for
conversion of land measurement to a decimal system may have been, it was